James Frost, director of the popular music video clip “House of Cards” by Radiohead among others was approached by Ogilvy & Mather NY to direct the new spot for the IBM Smarter Planet campaign. The result is is a stunning journey through an invironment of raw data.

James Frost, Zoo Films:
When Ogilvy New York approached me with the concept for the spot, I was immediately interested as it was an opportunity to take everything I’d learnt from the Radiohead House of Card video I made and explore the different techniques possible with 3D scanning. The Radiohead project was showing data in its purest form – it had a distinctive look and feel and was very much exactly how I saw it for the song, where as with IBM we wanted build a world which was created from data and within this world show how data exists.

The Smart Planet campaign focuses on how organizations around the world are going about the business of actually building it. One of the pillars of building a smarter planet is the emergence of data and the ability to harness it for answers to our biggest problems. With the current campaign, they wanted to educate business leaders on the importance of data, provide some context for its proliferation, and suggest the enormous opportunities that lie within it.